POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Reel Politics: American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon. Terry Christensen. Basil Blackwell, $24.95. Hollywood has always been a hotbed of political...
...Her title reflects her feeling that she grew up raw, "primitive as a weed," in a family that struggled for survival in lawless western towns and mining camps...
...In the middle of her life they forced her to slow down for several years of psychoanalysis...
...Harvard University Press, $22.50, cloth...
...Knopf $2.5 Having been but a baby dissident myself, I never did get to experience the formative hells of a political prison in a workers' paradise...
...central oversight of research...
...Since then, many of her books—especially her reporting on China, which appeared in magazines ranging from The Nation to, of all places, Vogue—have found their way back into print...
...The endless instructions, both particular and general, are often embarrassing: "Be cheerful, level-headed, healthy, and sociable, do your tasks conscientiously, keep track of what goes on, don't let trivial matters upset you, think about me and keep your fingers crossed for me, try to get along well with everyone...
...In a larger sense, any book that attempts to explain why Americans don't vote and does not address a more adversarial attitude between citizen and government...
...In 1963, President John F. Kennedy established a commission to recommend ways to enhance voter participation...
...The only moment of spontaneity came when Reagan was asked why...
...We learn more from what the candidates say inadvertently in debates than from what they say intentionally...
...Even so, judging by her absence from books such as Radcliffe College's voluminous Notable American Women, she seems to be considered neither notable nor quotable by some of those who should admire her most...
...Havel received four-and-a-half years in prison for disseminating unacceptable writings...
...Vaclav Havel's letters deliver the reader to a pivotal moment in the history of Central Europe...
...But while Hollywood celebrities embrace the rough and tumble of partisan (usually left-ofcenter) politics, Hollywood movies usually shun ideology and portray the world of politics as grubby and futile...
...The result, writes Christensen, a professor of political science at San Jose State, is that political movies "keep us passive...
...Something about this book reminds one of the sign, "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts" None of this is to suggest that voting laws and procedures do not pose obstacles for some citizens and should not be liberalized...
...But even if they were all instituted today, they wouldn't solve the problem...
...and various voter outreach programs...
...If not, they'd at least have to respond to their opponent's zingers...
...Bureaucracies are inherently political...
...Oxford University Press, $19.95 Presidential campaign debates are like White House press conferences-they're not much, but they're all we've got...
...generous and centralized finances...
...Curtis B. Gans Presidential Debates: Their Power, Problems, and Promise...
...When the news of John Lennon's assassination reaches him, he experiences that chill of recognition familiar to all of us for whom the music and style of the sixties were an intrinsic part of our thinking...
...For instance, they convincingly refute the idea that nonvoting is symptomatic of a satisfied society...
...That's hard to tell...
...But the authors' monomaniacal concern with registration law obscures important issues they themselves raise...
...This left Smedley with an ambivalent anger at her father that carried over to all men, and an equally ambivalent contempt for the weakness of women...
...Isolated by prison, Havel wonders whether Lennon's death is also affecting others as strongly, and is soon confirmed in that belief by an article forwarded to him by Olga...
...a decline in standards of probity of government leaders...
...That brief abandon came to an end in Central Europe in the Prague Spring of 1968...
...Not long after, he emigrated to Canada, and he now lives in Toronto...
...To begin with, the administration was cutting funds for health services in general...
...I have no doubt that given time (or the times, those wild mid-sixties) I would have been in an excellent position to do so...
...Meanwhile, Frank Capra and others made films like Mr...
...Had the flaws not existed, the government could—and would—have contained AIDS...
...We hear him discoursing seemingly at random on every book that falls into his hands, whether it is a Soviet history book or an old French novel...
...University of California Press, $25...
...The administration failed to really mobilize against AIDS because in the early 1980s, when the disease's spread could have been slowed, it didn't want to...
...She formed strong personal rela tionships—and love affairs—with nonWestern revolutionaries whose views on women and marriage did not agree with hers...
...Sandra Panem...
...Smedley's mother died young, from malnutrition and lack of medical care as much as anything else...
...Demo cracy has to unsettle society to much deeper levels...
...But there are differences...
...In fact, real life tells us that one man often can make a difference...
...Within three days, the public knuckles under and accepts the press verdict...
...I was a panelist in the first Reagan-Mondale debate in 1984, and I asked both candidates about taxes and the role of religion in public life...
...a dearth of national direction...
...Enter Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, arguing that the principal obstacles to enhanced voter turnout and to the mobilization of the American underclass are registration laws and administrative procedures...
...The difference—the great difference!— was that the Eastern and Central European youth did not have the luxury of drifting about the world experiencing it...
...visual aids such as maps should be utilized...
...They need leadership to move...
...Deirdre English The AIDS Bureaucracy...
...But let's not get our hopes up...
...But what do we learn...
...mass media that increasingly sees its role, to paraphrase Neil Postman, as amusing Americans to death...
...There is, for instance, little systematized cooperation between the epidemiologists at CDC and the research scientists at NIH, and frequently there's a great deal of tension...
...Kafka's name comes up quite often, and not accidentally...
...an erosion of responsive government and its ability to anticipate and address long-term problems...
...In China, though she devoted herself to the revolution, she could measure its costs in repression...
...weak misaligned parties without a mass message...
...There was no place where she truly fit in...
...it was just more difficult to be heard...
...She wrote Daughter of Earth as part of the process...
...There's nothing wrong with any of these recommendations...
...The MacKinnons spent 14 years, two of them in China, rediscovering Smedley's migrations from an impoverished and brutalized childhood in a Colorado mining town in the 1890s to the socialist and feminist circles of Greenwich Village in the 1910s to her years spent reporting on the Chinese revolution...
...Most folks scarcely follow campaigns and thus have only the most shallow grasp of the issues...
...Reagan said any church he attended might be blown up (presumably by terrorists), and he didnIt want to inconvenience the parishioners...
...Alexander Solzhenitsyn's severity gave way to the avant-garde...
...Janice R. MacKinnon, Stephen R. MacKinnon...
...If her political commitments were in part formed out of personal need, maybe Smedley found a valuable way to unite her created self with her painful past, healing herself by helping the world...
...and the increasing complexity of the average citizen's life, is simply not a serious attempt to understand the problem...
...It probably won't be necessary for the whole of Czech or Russian society to be unsettled to the depths to which Havel unsettles his mind...
...In Prague, for example, there is a John Lennon wall, white-washed by the authorities many times over, that nonetheless continues to be scrawled with expressions of freedom in many languages...
...I do not believe that certain values and ideals of the sixties have been discredited as empty illusions and mistakes...
...Meditating on the meaning of Lennon's death, he has a generational epiphany...
...But the honest exploratory spirit that landed him in prison and that produced this book ought to be held exemplary...
...And with the possible exception of its surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, the administration never had Mother Teresa-like sympathy for the homosexuals and drug addicts most stricken by AIDS...
...Havel compares Lennon's death to John Kennedy's and finds that he is moved more profoundly by it because Lennon is more intimately a part of himself...
...Changing the debate format won't alter this sad performance...
...One time her father ran a team of horses for six months— only to be taunted by his employer with a "contract" that he had unlcnowingly signed that forfeited payment...
...Havel, author of this collection of prison letters to his wife, was a central figure of the gradually darkening years of the seventies...
...In his absence the family was rescued by a feisty aunt who worked as a seamstress and, according to Smedley, sometimes as a prostitute to support them...
...Smedley groaned in exasperation when idealistic socialists alternately preached to the poor or romanticized the uneducated—she knew that knowledge was liberating...
...Vaclav and Olga's relationship (her letters are not published here) is not likely to please feminists...
...debates should be limited to narrow topics...
...Timothy Noah Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical...
...a more selfseeking attitude on the part of the individual citizen...
...To solve these and other problems, Panem, a science writer, proposes a number of remedial steps: the establishment of an AIDS "czar...
...I couldn't make up my mind whether I liked the writer of these letters enough to go on, until I became slowly captivated by the story of Vaclav's mind as it rediscovers itself in prison...
...With one inconsequential exception, all of the commission's 18 recommendations have been adopted in whole or in part...
...An interesting answer, but what did it reveal about Reagan's character,or his ability to govern effectively...
...These government agencies are illequipped to react quickly to a health emergency...
...To Central European writers, Czechs in particular, Kafka was not a writer of allegories or parables...
...His writings are "truth," pure and simple...
...a shortened period between the close of registration and election day...
...In her first marriage, to a beloved friend and mentor, she sought to avoid sex for months...
...A case can be made that the Chicago Democratic National Convention of that year performed the same service for our Western brothers and sisters...
...Letters to Olga contains the majority of his prison letters to his wife...
...And not every film he looks at denigrates democracy as much as he thinks it does...
...As a foreign correspondent, she reported on the military— but also on sexuality and the family...
...bilingual ballots...
...Later films like The Candidate and The Seduction of Joe Tynan abandoned the conceit that even one good man could beat the system...
...It wasn't solely because of a flawed bureaucracy that the Reagan administration bungled AIDS...
...At those times it is useful to remember-particularly in the beguiled and easily charmed West—that true change cannot come from the top...
...Election results that show a sharp increase in turnout in 1982 (as compared to 1978), despite no increase in registration, and a sharp decrease in turnout in 1986 (as compared to 1982), despite a sharp increase in registration...
...In focusing on bureaucratic snags, Panem misses a larger point...
...The glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation is often (and correctly) described as racist, but it also bequeathed the theme that democratic government can't solve real human problems...
...They watch debates and usually end up thinking better of both candidates...
...Obviously, culture influences our politics, but Christensen is too alarmist about the power of movies...
...In Romania, where I was born, bred, and precociously thought myself a poet, I had been headed that way, along with other writers of my generation, ever since the first thaw of 1963, when Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech let some savage ghosts out of the bag of authorized history, including the unspeakable Gulag...
...This assertion flies in the face of: ?Data that shows that in North Dakota, which has no registration barriers because it has no personal registration, the decline in voter participation in the last decade has been substantially greater than that of the nation as a whole, and that in Wisconsin and Minnesota, after an initial surge in voter participation following the adoption of election day registration in those states, voter participation has been declining more steeply than in the rest of the nation...
...It was a heady time, filled with the beat of that esprit du temps that saw young people from Bucharest to Detroit shed futures planned by Central Committees in the East or social convention in the West to plunge headlong into the unknown...
...This happened in 1976 when the press wildly exaggerated the significance of Ford's blooper about Poland and in 1984 when reporters gave Reagan too much credit for a canned joke about Mondale's "youth and inexperience...
...Then the press steps in and declares a winner based on who generated the best "sound bytes" for TV news shows...
...Yet over the past 25 years, voter turnout has declined by nearly 20 percent in presidential elections—and more than 20 percent in mid-term elections—so that the United States now has the lowest rate of voter participation of any democracy in the world...
...Four years later, I still haven't figured that out...
...Introspection is simple self-defense in prison, and Havel examines himself rigorously, chronicling and classifying his every mood...
...Smedley did not fail to ask these tormenting questions of herself...
...Andrei Codrescu...
...The Memorandum was produced by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1968 and won an Obie...
...The Charter's typewritten reports, documenting human rights violations, were widely circulated and carefully read...
...With AIDS, they didn't get it...
...He expressed his rage in drinking, abusing his wife, and often abandoning his family...
...permitted to speak...
...Candidates who get by on superficial knowledge of many issues but mastery of none might be exposed...
...Many writers and intellectuals chose exile to the West or made their apologies and crawled back into the still-warm cells of the Party...
...At the time of his arrest, Havel was a well-known playwright who had received world-wide attention for The Garden Party, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, and The Memorandum, plays that captured the imagination of the Czech public with their savage dissection of a hopelessly bureaucratic society where the absurd is part of everyday life...
...In what seems like only a few moments before talk of glasnost became commonplace, a voice from the inside is speaking clearly and intelligently about personal and political freedom...
...The termination of the Prague spring of 1968 was for Central Europe the distinct end of a great adventure...
...the role of message-obfuscating politica l consultants...
...In 1979, six signatories of Charter 77 were brought to trial in Prague...
...the enfranchisement of blacks and 18- to 20-year-old youths...
...longterm strategic planning, and others...
...Christensen usefully traces the various ways Hollywood has denigrated politics during the past 80 years...
...The hair curtain suddenly became more important than the iron one...
...They found themselves locked in a fight with the security apparatus, a body notoriously lacking in subtlety and humor...
...They ask: Was she also running away—from her family, her working-class background, her relationships...
...Taken as a whole, they help elevate the abstraction "dissident," or even "dissident writer," to the status of being human, with all its incumbent flaws...
...Her whole life was marked by conflict between her need to be loved and her terror of entrapment...
...The philosophical basis of Charter 77 (so named for the number of people who signed it) was an amalgam of the best of sixties ideals: nonviolence, openness, tolerance, democratic participation...
...What happens next in Gorbachev's experiment depends very much on how freely voices like Havel's will Ix...
...The letters are numbered and dated, to give notice to prison censors that record-keeping was going on...
...No one has satisfactorily explained," they argue, "why the politics of happiness is so consistently concentrated among the least well off" The authors correctly attribute part of the decline to the increasing disinclination of both parties to mobilize nonvoters and particularly that of the Democratic party to appeal to the nonvoting underclass...
...As we've seen from recent events in Poland, demands for change may still exceed the goodwill of the Party...
...he writes, "though it is a history of repressions, murders, stupidities, wars, and violence, it is at the same time a history of magnificent dreams, longings, and ideals" Having come to intellectual maturity during the decade that ended in the Prague Spring, Havel, like his contempory Milan Kundera and many others, is a firm believer in certain givens of that generation: the world is ruled by fearful old men whose vested interests lie in protecting a corrupt power structure...
...Kathleen Hall Jamieson, David S. Birdsell...
...mail registration...
...He served most of his term but was abruptly released in January 1984 while he was ill with a raging fever...
...Its findings, reported shortly after his untimely death, urged among other things: the abolition of poll taxes and literacy tests...
...The result is a marriage of personal and political insight...
...9.95, paper...
...And they accurately attribute the Democratic disinclination to the bureaucratization, ossification, and gerontofication of the American labor movement, which has in recent years sought to defend its diminishing position rather than expand its base...
...There isn't even a clear definition of what constitutes such an emergency...
...Richard Blow Why Americans Don't Vote...
...From 1968 until 1979, the date of Vaclav Havel's last arrest, paranoia and repression entrenched themselves in the hungover survivors of the sixties...
...The real problem with presidential debates is the public and the press...
...Their answers were lifeless snippets from their campaign speeches or full-blown efforts at saying nothing and thus avoiding a gaffe...
...He's especially rough on the one-man-can-make-a-difference theme found in Capra's films, which, far from being a cop-out, strikes me as a cheering affirmation of democracy...
...Pantheon, $19.95...
...Fred Barnes Letters to Olga...
...In 1978 he cofounded (with Jiri Hajek) Charter 77, an organization formed to further democracy in Czechoslovakia, including monitoring the cases of people indicted and imprisoned for their political views...
...Some were censored and never delivered...
...The government's health care bureaucracy couldn't handle AIDS because of structural flaws, Panem writes...
...youth and love are the chief enemies of this grotesque tribe of bureaucratic vampires...
...Elsewhere, he instructs Olga on how to do her hair...
...But as the letters go on, the relationship changes...
...Vaclav Havel...
...Christensen sneers at the film version of All the President's Men for arguing that "brave individuals, a free press, and public opinion can bring the evil men down—the traditional Hollywood view:' But that's what really happened...
...Milan Kundera's wonderful art is hidden in that moment in the mid-sixties...
...In this brief (256 pages) book, Jamieson and Birdsell give a nice rundown of how presidential debates evolved and how they should be changed: the press panel should be scrapped in favor of a conversational format with a single moderator...
...If it hadn't been for the reissue of her brilliant autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, in 1973, by The Feminist Press, Agnes Smedley would have been relegated to oblivion by now...
...For Americans, it was still possible to agitate against the state after 1968...
...Frances Fox Piven, Richard A. Cloward...
...Forced to confront political constraints in every corner of their lives, they became aware of the way in which words like "peace" and "love" turn into their opposites and how a society allegedly dedicated to utopia is in fact a prison...
...Smith Goes to Washington, championing the little guy who bucks the system—but, Christensen objects, this implied that "only the personnel, not the institutions, needed changing...
...It's a mistake to write of the health system, as Panem does, as if it functions in a vacuum...
...Better to round up a posse of your own...
...I was reminded that the feminist critique in the United States began with an analysis of what was wrong with precisely such committed couples as Vaclav and Olga...
...a decline in the quality of education in general and civic education in particular...
...Kafka described for all times our bureaucratic nightmare...
...Smedley ought to be considered one of America's most impressive radicals, that rare breed of activist who moved to the heart of the revolutionary struggle without allowing her judgment to get swept away...
...The irritations of the first letters, which must have been the tenor of their pre-prison relationship, give way to respect and even affection...
...No one denies imperfections in the Public Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services...
...In the 1930s, film portrayals of leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt seemed to be celebrating democracy, but in fact these figures were placed on a pedestal above politics, where they commanded blind loyalty from the masses...
...This core of ideas was held passionately across the borders East and West...
...The smashing of the counterculture in the United States and elsewhere was mostly a war of images, with a few violent exceptions...
...Hollywood has always been a hotbed of political activism, from Charlie Chaplin hawking World War I bonds right on through to Oscar-winner Olympia Dukakis stumping for her cousin Michael...
...It is in many ways a typical sixties relationship, in which a so-called progressive husband grudgingly makes room for the personality of his spouse...
...the increasing costs of campaigns and concomitant increasing dependence on moneyed interests...
...I agree on all counts...
...as a professed Christian, he never goes to church...
...Born among the shards of post-war Europe under the totalitarian absence of thought imposed by rigid Marxist revision, the children of the sixties availed themselves of all culture...
...But hardier souls had also been forged during the golden era of dissidence, people who refused to abandon the struggle for democracy and human values...
...when she became pregnant she reacted with attempted suicide and finally had an abortion...
...Havel's eclecticism is not solely philosophical...
Vol. 20 • October 1988 • No. 9
